A Day in the Life of...

     I subbed today in a technology class, where one group of middle schoolers was working on a photo story assignment about a day in the life of someone or something.  Several of the kids were doing stories about their pets.  A couple of the more creative boys were depicting a day in the life of their backpack and an old p.c.
     One girl was interviewing and photographing their family's amah (household helper) and driver to show what they do on their day off--great idea.   I recently read a description of a colonial Hong Konger treating his Chinese household help "like vapor".  Middle school is a good time for these privileged kids to have their perceptions shaken up a bit through a project like this.
     As I was circulating in the room and looking over shoulders, a Google Earth image on a screen caught my eye:  big clumps of green vegetation and trees, winding carpets of flat fields, a building here and there...this was definitely not Hong Kong.  I asked the girl who was navigating around this green scene if it was part of her project.  Yes, she said, this is where she spends her summers in the U.K.  Her father is an earl, she said, and she zoomed in and showed me the boundaries of his estate, his house and so on.
     She took me on a virtual drive down the road that she and her cousins ride their motorbikes on to do their chores, such as feeding the pheasants and going into the nearest village to buy butter and milk at the dairy.  Is that a cattle grate?  I asked, looking at the grid that appeared in the road as she went through a gate.  Yes, she said, her uncle had about 150 cattle on his land in the summertime.  She showed me a lake where neighborhood people paid her uncle to come and fish in the summertime and where they could ice skate in the winter.  A little further down the road was the village, with aging dark red brick houses.  Some of them used to have thatched roofs, she said, but they're too expensive anymore.  Prominent in the village was a huge gray stone church, where she said her parents were married.  Above a low wall surrounding the church, reclining against a grassy slope, was a side-by-side line of old headstones.  These used to be sunken into the ground all over the church yard, she said.  I asked if she had any relatives buried there.  No, she said, my grandpa is buried right here, and navigated out into the countryside to an open spot between some trees.  I pointed to another open spot nearby, a big gray square near a house and some outbuildings.  That's where the stables used to be, she said.  Now we just use motorbikes.
     A summertime day in the life of the earl's niece sounds like a pleasant respite from spending the school year in Hong Kong.